When the World Changed

I remember watching a tv show in my parents' room that night, the night the world changed. This very news coverage broke in. I was astounded. How could this happen? For as along as I could remember there were two Germanys, an East and a West. I went into the family room and told my parents what I had just seen, and I remember so vividly what my father said to me: "Cristina, you must have heard wrong; that will never happen." I know what I had seen, and right on cue the channel they were watching broke in with a similar broadcast. However it wasn't an issue of being right or wrong. The issue was that finally, a country that had for so long been divided, was now united.

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" President Reagan had said. The line even today still gives me chills. Never before, and probably never again, will a president ever be so bold as to challenge a world leader again. And mean it. And even though it took a few years before that wall came down, and there will be critics and skeptics who will not believe that President Reagan had anything to do with it, that's not the point. The point is that wall, symbolically, divided a country as if it were it were a bedroom shared by two fighting siblings who couldn't get a long. It didn't matter if families never saw each other again, or friends or life long companions. All that mattered was that it showed how ideologies were more important than people. How far gone must the discussion have been in order for a wall to have been the only answer, for a wall to have been what made sense. How ridiculous. How asinine. How petty.

When that wall came down, many will say that it was the beginning of the end for the communist regime in Europe. Surely, it was as soon thereafter it fell in the former Soviet Union. However, the destruction of the Berlin Wall was more than that. That wall brought people back together. It humanized a country that needed to be humanized once more. When we lose the human element in our fellow man, we forget that he is a living breathing soul. And then we all begin to sit behind walls of our own making. If that begins to happen, no one will hear the cry of the lone man, "Tear down that wall!" Worse yet, no one will be around to tear them down and greet us on the other side.

Tear down these walls.